574 Quotes by George Santayana

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

Heaven is to be at peace with things.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.